Prepared
by my Cato colleague, Andrew Coulson, it shows that massive increases
in spending and bureaucracy (which accompanied increasing federal
involvement and intervention) have had zero impact on educational
performance.

Keep that chart in the back of your mind as we consider what George Will has to say about President Obama’s scheme – known as Common Core – to expand federal involvement and intervention.

We have several excerpts, beginning with this passage outlining some of his concerns.

Common Core…is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to
advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive
agenda of centralization and uniformity. …proponents of the Common Core
want its nature and purpose to remain as cloudy as possible for as long
as possible. Hence they say it is a “state-led,” “voluntary” initiative
to merely guide education with “standards” that are neither written nor
approved nor mandated by Washington… Proponents talk warily when
describing it because a candid characterization would reveal yet another
Obama administration indifference to legality.

Will then notes that we’ve been sliding down the slippery slope of centralization and Washington control.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the original
federal intrusion into this state and local responsibility, said
“nothing in this act” shall authorize any federal official to “mandate,
direct, or control” schools’ curriculums. The 1970 General Education
Provisions Act stipulates that “no provision of any applicable program
shall be construed to authorize any” federal agency or official “to
exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum,
program of instruction” or selection of “instructional materials by any”
school system. The 1979 law creating the Education Department forbids
it from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the
curriculum” or “program of instruction” of any school system.

And Common Core is just the latest example.

…what begins with mere national standards must breed ineluctable
pressure to standardize educational content. Targets, metrics,
guidelines and curriculum models all induce conformity in instructional
materials. Washington already is encouraging the alignment of the GED,
SAT and ACT tests with the Common Core. By a feedback loop, these tests
will beget more curriculum conformity. All of this will take a toll on
parental empowerment, and none of this will escape the politicization of
learning like that already rampant in higher education.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re aware of other slippery slope examples, such as the tiny income tax in 1913 that has morphed into the internal revenue code monstrosity of today.

Returning to the topic of education, Will warns that the
one-size-fits-all approach will undermine the innovation and
experimentation needed to figure out how best teach kids.

Even satisfactory national standards must extinguish federalism’s
creativity: At any time, it is more likely there will be half a dozen
innovative governors than one creative federal education bureaucracy.
And the mistakes made by top-down federal reforms are continental mistakes.

The bottom line, as Will explains, is that Common Core is yet another example of a failed approach.

What is ludicrous is Common Core proponents disdaining concerns
related to this fact: Fifty years of increasing Washington input into
K-12 education has coincided with disappointing cognitive outputs from
schools. Is it eccentric that it is imprudent to apply to K-12 education
the federal touch that has given us HealthCare.gov? …Opposition to the
Common Core is surging because Washington, hoping to mollify opponents,
is saying, in effect: “If you like your local control of education, you
can keep it. Period.”

You won’t be surprised to learn that Cato Institute experts are among the leading opponents of Common Core. Here’s what Andrew Coulson, in a column warning about the negative impact on private schools, has written.

…the Common Core–aligned tests create a powerful incentive for schools
to teach the same concepts in the same order at the same time. This
would make it all but impossible for schools to experiment with new ways
of tailoring education to meet the needs of individual children — they
will instead have to resort to expecting that all children who happened
to be born in the same year progress at the same rate across subjects.

And another Cato scholar, Neil McCluskey, points out that other education experts also think Common Core is a dud.

The Common Core is opposed by scholars at leading think tanks on the
right and the left, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover
Institution, the Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute. My
research has shown that there is essentially no meaningful evidence that
national standards lead to superior educational outcomes. Hoover
Institution Senior Fellow Eric Hanushek, an education economist and
supporter of standards-based education reform, has reached a similar
conclusion, recently writing: “We currently have very different
standards across states, and experience from the states provides little
support for the argument that simply declaring more clearly what we want
children to learn will have much impact.” Hanushek’s conclusion
dovetails nicely with Common Core opposition from Tom Loveless, a
scholar at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. In 2012, Loveless
demonstrated that moving to national standards would have little, if
any, positive effect because the performance of states has very little
connection to the rigor or quality of their standards, and there is much
greater achievement variation within states than among them. In fact,
Loveless has been one of the clearest voices saying the Core is not a
panacea for America’s education woes, writing: “Don’t let the ferocity
of the oncoming debate fool you. The empirical evidence suggests that
the Common Core will have little effect on American students’
achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve
its schools.”

We started this post with a very powerful chart, so let’s end with another chart.

It’s not as visually compelling, but it shows that the United States already spends more on education than another other nation.

But if you look at the data is this post, you’ll see that American students are lagging behind their counterparts in other developed nations.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to put kids first. Perhaps we should
discard the Bush-Obama approach of centralization and spending and
instead choose a better path.

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, Which Nation Has Increased Welfare Spending the Fastest of All?

There’s an old joke about two guys camping in the woods, when suddenly
they see a hungry bear charging over a hill in their direction. One of
the guys starts lacing up his sneakers and his friend says, “What are
you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” The other guys says, I don’t have
to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.”

That’s reasonably amusing, but it also provides some insight into
national competitiveness. In the battle for jobs and investments,
nations can change policy to impact their attractiveness, but they also
can gain ground or lose ground because of what happens in other
nations.

The paper looks at changes in the burden of welfare spending over the
past 14 years. The story understandably focuses on how the United
Kingdom is faring compared to other European nations.

Welfare spending in Britain has increased faster than almost any
other country in Europe since 2000, new figures show. The cost of
unemployment benefits, housing support and pensions as share of the
economy has increased by more than a quarter over the past thirteen
years – growing at a faster rate than in most of the developed world.
Spending has gone up from 18.6 per cent of GDP to 23.7 per cent of GDP –
an increase of 27 per cent, according to figures from the OECD, the
club of most developed nations. By contrast, the average increase in
welfare spending in the OECD was 16 per cent.

This map from the story shows how welfare spending has changed in
various nations, with darker colors indicating a bigger expansion in the
welfare state.

American readers, however, may be more interested in this excerpt.

In the developed world, only the United States and the stricken
eurozone states of Ireland, Portugal and Spain – which are blighted by
high unemployment – have increased spending quicker than Britain.

Yes, you read correctly. The United States expanded the welfare state faster than almost every European nation.

Here’s another map, but I’ve included North America and pulled out the
figures for the countries that suffered the biggest increases in
welfare spending. As you can see, only Ireland and Portugal were more profligate than the United States.

Needless to say, this is not a good sign for the United States.

But the situation is not hopeless. The aforementioned numbers simply
tell us the rate of change in welfare spending. But that doesn’t tell us
whether countries have big welfare states or small welfare states.

That’s why I also pulled out the numbers showing the current burden of
welfare spending – measured as a share of economic output – for
countries in North America and Western Europe.

This data is more favorable to the United States. As you can see,
America still has one of the lowest overall levels of welfare spending
among developed nations.

Ireland also is in a decent position, so the real lesson of the data
is that the United States and Ireland must have been in relatively
strong shape back in 2000, but the trend over the past 14 years has been
very bad.

Let’s close by seeing if any nations have been good performers. The Telegraph does note that Germany has done a good job of restraining spending. The story even gives a version of Mitchell’s Golden Rule by noting that good policy happens when spending grows slower than private output.

Over the thirteen years from 2000, Germany has cut welfare spending
as a share of GDP by 1.5 per cent… Such reductions are possible by
increasing welfare bills at a lower rate than growth in the economy.

But the more important question is whether there are nations that get
good scores in both categories.

In other words, have they controlled
spending since 2000 while also having a comparatively low burden of
welfare outlays?
Here
are the five nations with the smallest increases in welfare spending
since 2000. You can see that Germany had the best relative performance,
but you’ll notice from the previous table that Germany is not on the
list of five nations with the smallest overall welfare burdens. Indeed,
German welfare spending consumes 26.2 percent of GDP, so Germany still
has a long way to go.

The nation that does show up on both lists for frugality is
Switzerland. Spending has grown relatively slowly since 2000 and the
Swiss also have the third-lowest overall burdens of welfare spending.

By the way, Canada deserves honorable mention. It has the
second-lowest overall burden of welfare spending, and it had the
sixth-best performance in controlling spending since 2000. Welfare
outlays in our northern neighbor grew by 10 percent since 2000, barely
one-fourth as fast as the American increase during the reckless Bush-Obama years.

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The Patriot Factor

I am an American Patriot...part of the grassroots movement of bloggers spreading the truth the media will not. I am also co-host with Craig Andresen of RIGHT SIDE PATRIOTS on RSP Radio at: https://streamingv2.shoutcast.com/right-side-patriots